Can Indian movies ever recreate the magic of a housefull Friday show?

The mosaic figures of a man and a woman at Prabhu Cinema in Agra are inspired by Raj Kapoor’s RK Films logo. Photographed by Hemant Chaturvedi.

Over the next six years, Chaturvedi travelled to 20 states and shot over 1,250 theatres—all self-funded and self-produced—and documented innumerable personal histories and cultural quirks in the process. He learnt of the now-demolished Eves Talkies in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, which actor, director and producer Raj Kapoor had a special relationship with, that had built a secret underground tunnel so his family could come and go without being mobbed. In a theatre in Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh, a region ripe with banana plantations, an amusing sign specifically forbade bananas from being brought into the cinema hall. Some theatres, like Gayathri Talkies in Mysuru, still go housefull to this day, thanks to the fandom of South Indian superstars, and then, there’s the touching story of one cinema owner in Jalna, Maharashtra, who refuses to cancel shows despite poor ticket sales, because the theatre is named after his grandmother. In this vein, some theatre owners have held onto their projectors from the 1920s like the treasures that they are, even while others have discarded them at “nine rupees a kilo.” Concurrently, Chaturvedi himself has collected a museum’s worth of memorabilia, including about 50 vintage projection lenses from the 1940s to the 1970s, spools of film, cinema brochures dating back to 1916, hand-painted advertisement slides, over a thousand tickets and two vintage projectors of his own.

These spoils, and the photographs themselves, are a testament to the scope of skilled labour that cinema halls once employed, from projectionists, who often had to train for years before they could run machines on their own, to artists, who hand-painted film posters, not to mention the ancillary businesses that cropped up around the cinema selling chai, juice or paan.